Member Spotlight: Green Button Alliance

About Green Button Alliance
The Green Button Alliance (GBA) fosters the development, compliance and widespread adoption of the Green Button standard. Members include utilities, governmental departments and agencies, solution providers and affiliate organizations that collaborate to advance the Green Button initiative to enable consumers to access and share their energy, water and natural gas usage data to better manage their consumption.

The GBA educates the market on the broad benefits of the Green Button standard, encourages standards-based application development and administers the Green Button Testing and Certification Program to accelerate the delivery of standardized Green Button technologies to consumers.

What is the Green Button Standard?
The Green Button initiative is an industry-led effort to respond to a White House call-to-action to provide electricity customers with easy access to their energy usage data in a consumer-friendly and computer-friendly format. In addition to electricity, the Green Button now also supports natural gas and water usage data.

In September 2011, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, challenged utilities across the country to develop “Green Button” – a means of providing detailed customer energy-usage information available for download in a simple, common format. Through utility industry support for Green Button, consumers would be able to make better-informed decisions about their energy consumption. Standardizing on the data format could result in innovative applications that might transform the way people use energy.

The Green Button effort was created with the support of the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), the Utility Communications Architecture International Users Group (UCAIug) and the White House.

Green Button Alliance Webinars

Why is Green Button Data Access So Important?
To empower consumers of electricity, natural gas and water to change their behaviors around usage, these end users must be aware of their use and their patterns of use. To do that, they need access to their usage data. Once they have access, they can take action to reduce their overall usage, determine if solar might be right for them, allow companies and apps to assist in understanding where improvements (e.g., insulation, UV glazing, new appliances, LED lighting, low-flow showerheads) may be able to help them and even save money via time-based rate programs.

In addition to the end users’ benefits, there may be societal and environmental benefits to these reductions and peak-shaving actions, where climate change mitigation starts from measuring one’s impact as the start to making those changes. Enough collective shifting of use from peak hours of the day may enable a utility to avoid use of diesel generators to make up the difference. That may reduce costs for the utility and reduce charges to the end users — all while benefiting the environment.

Going a Step Farther than Just the Standard
While standards are great for driving innovation in a way that allows producers, suppliers, implementers and end users to create and share interoperable solutions without having to sit at a table together customizing every solution, standards alone are not enough.

The Green Button Alliance offers a certification program that verifies that the standard is consistently interpreted and properly implemented. It also gives end users and those building complementary solutions an assurance that a given implementation complies with the standard. To learn more about certification for your organization, click here.

In 2017, SGCC will be recognizing a member monthly, providing an organizational profile and highlighting the member’s accomplishments and output in the smart grid space. Order of recognition is random and all members will receive a spotlight.